College administrators resign all the time, either because the people they answer to want them to go or because they obtain better jobs. But sometimes it looks like the amount of vacancies are a little high.
According to a piece by Laura Diamond at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The University System of Georgia is hunting for college presidents and will need at least eight new campus leaders by August.
The system currently has presidential search committees in operation for Valdosta State and Georgia College & State universities. Four other colleges have interim presidents, and two additional presidents plan to retire June 30. The new president of Gordon College starts Jan. 1.
The chancellor of the Georgia system insists that this isn’t unusual. “There have been other years where there were about 10 president openings,” said his spokesman.
Still the fact that almost a quarter of the system’s leaders are leaving seems like a pretty important problem to solve, no matter how often it occurs.
Could this be related to the recent demise of the HOPE Scholarship, the decade-old, lottery-funded program that guaranteed essentially free tuition to Georgia high school students with a B-average who stayed in the state for college?
Without all those students with guaranteed scholarships, it’s certainly more difficult to manage a state college in Georgia, doesn’t it?